rosenberg2010cartographies

p. 10: Understanding the origins of the timeline “helps us understanding where our contemporary conceptions of history come from, how they work, and, especially, how they rely on visual forms.”

p. 14: The modern timeline of today is not even 250 years old.

p. 19: “The key problem in chronographics, it turned out, was not how to design more complex visual schemes—the approach of many would-be innovators in the seventeenth century—but, rather, how to simplify, how to create a visual scheme to clearly communicate the uniformity, directionality, and irreversibility of historical time.”

p. 19: Pointing to the Priestley timeline that, although influenced by centuries of experimentation in representing time, was “the first chart to present a complete and fully theorized visual vocabulary for a time map, and the first to successfully compete with the matrix as a normative structure for representing regular chronology.” Priestley’s timelines also came at an important historical moment, representing “concepts of historical progress that were becoming popular during the eighteenth century.”

p. 20: Priestley referred to his timelines as a “most excellent mechanical help to the knowledge of history,” not a reflection of history itself.